That's not true, at least in the UK, some of the new challenger banks like Starling already offer everything Apple is offering here including no international fees, and the exchange rate they give is MasterCard's mid-market exchange rate, so is the actual real world market exchange rate, that means you don't pay anything to use your card abroad for either cash withdrawls or spending. The same applies if you buy anything online in a foreign currency, it's great; this is a debit card it's worth pointing out though, I don't know the details on their credit cards. You basically get a notification to your phone the second you make a foreign transaction that tells you how much it converted to in GBP.
I see this move by Apple as being similar to the iPhone launch in 2007. There are a number of industries where the US is just completely backwards, despite being technologically ahead of much of the rest of the world in most other areas. In 2007 that was mobile phones, currently banking is another example of an area where the US is at least 5 years behind the UK and Europe in terms of banking technology. Just as with the iPhone though, Apple leapfrogged Europe and ended up making the US a world leader in mobile phones, and so could well do the same here. What Apple is offering is effectively all the things UK banks have been offering for a few years now, but I don't mean that in a bad way; it means that Apple is bringing the US up to at least being on par with the UK in terms of credit card technology and offerings; in other words, Apple is bringing the US credit card market 5 years forward to the level many Europeans have come to accept as the norm. That gives Apple a massive advantage over other US banks and organisations that just don't seem interested in keeping up with the global leaders in consumer financial tech.
What I'm curious about is whether the itemisation of spending is closed or not in the US, it sounds like this is going to mirror a lot of the tech that has arisen around the Open Banking standards in the UK, where companies can produce categorization services that banks consume to categorise your expenditure for you and can do so due to the enforcement of open standards through Open Banking. I've just stopped working in the credit lending industry (mostly because I want my soul back), but I'm curious to see where Apple take this; the US consumer financial services market is desperate for modernisation to bring it up to par with Europe so there's massive scope here for Apple, but if they're not having to adhere to open standards like in the UK, then ultimately I believe they still won't be able to compete globally if they subsequently decide to do so due to the innovation that those Open Banking standards are bringing elsewhere.
Well, the fact I can get two hours of my day back by not commuting and instead work at home thanks to the internet is kind of a big deal.
I even get to spend my lunch time doing things I want to do, so there's yet another hour of my life back. Three hours of my life back per day I work at home, technology never made it easier to be a worker? Really? Are you fucking kidding?
Mostly the advantage used to be that having fixed hardware meant that developers could optimise specifically to the nuances of that hardware and get far more performance out of it than they ever could if they were just developing to the lowest common denominator they could reasonably support on the PC platform.
But it's also becoming less relevant nowadays, game development is getting ever more abstracted away from the hardware. It used to be that every game had it's own engine, or at least, there was a fairly substantial plurality of engines. This has become less true though, as the majority of games released nowadays are either built on Unity, or Unreal. The handful of studios that do still have their own engines are sufficiently large that they can support having them capable of performing on different hardware (and in fact, typically do anyway - Xbox, PS, Switch).
So I don't think it's really such an issue anymore, I don't think anyone is building games that are tightly coupled with the hardware on which they're running anymore. Optimisation is often done at engine level without the game running on the engine even having to care; things like shadows, particle systems, lighting and so on are degraded automatically by the engine, as are cross platform optimisations and nuances.
As such, it should be more possible than ever to get console games running on PCs providing the PC can provide the same services the console's OS can (achievements, party chat, cloud saves, etc.), which is really what this article is talking about.
I can't wait for the USS GoFundMe to enter the Strait of Hormuz to sort out Iran with it's complement of F-38 Kickstarter fighter jets piloted by guys in bright red Red Bull sponsored pilot suits all being livestreamed on Facebook playing to the tune of whatever the latest RIAA determined "hit of the moment" is.
That's not how it works, it only takes one single bacterium from outside the lake, to make it into the lake, and start multiplying over a period of time that just happens to be capable of killing off the primitive life in the lake to prevent us ever really discovering what was down there.
This isn't a dilution thing where the danger is the risk of some small amount of chemical entering the lake that's diluted so much that it doesn't matter, life can replicate, grow, and spread, and if something gets in that ends up thriving in that environment because it's more evolved and can out compete the primitive species in the environment then it's potentially game over for knowing what was native to this primitive environment and what wasn't.
"Apparently you have reading comprehension challenges?"
That's a really original thing to say on Slashdot and surely automatically wins any argument. I've never heard it before. Did you think it up all by yourself?
"I tried using short sentences throughout with a single point per sentence for clarity to aid in your apparent reading comprehension challenges. Tip: resorting to insults doesn't help your argument nor mean you're "winning". It does indicate that you have no arguments to offer."
So by posting an insult and then stating that anyone resorting to insults has no argument to offer, you seem to be saying in a rather roundabout way that you have no argument to offer. It would seem rather important when you have the option of either insults or taking the moral high ground to pick one and stick with it, else you've a rather high chance of shooting yourself in the foot as you have here.
Like I said, honestly, your underlying point is a good one, there are a lot of abusive employers out there who abuse temporary contracts for sure. But it's still unfair to assume the worst case in someone or their employer based on a complete lack of evidence to back up your argument when there are legitimate uses of temporary workers that benefit everyone involved, even if you have had the misfortune to encounter or be burnt by such companies.
If you can't accept my point then I'm okay with that. For what it's worth, my sarcasm towards your comments above aside, I think your worldview paints you as a rather decent human being and I think it's a good thing to call out abusive working practices. I'm really only merely making the point that I'd just consider that there's also the possibility that the person you're responding to isn't engaging in that and might also be a good person providing employment to people who are happy to contract too.
That's an awful lot of words to simply say "I think I'll continue making myself look stupid, rather than accept that it's possible for more than one person to have a point in a discussion", you could've saved yourself an awful lot of time.
You're still making way too many assumptions to possibly be able to reach the conclusion you have. Your talk of contractor salaries and other issues are so entirely localised, and yet you have absolutely no clue where this person even works, much less what the local market is like.
You know what they say about assumptions? That's why you're continuing to make yourself look stupid, rather than making an argument based on the facts.
Your claimed experience and hence appeal to authority doesn't mask over the fact your argument is fundamentally broken by way of the fact that you're effectively arguing consultancies couldn't work like that (even though they do; it's your assumptions that are the problem) because no one could manage 30 people and succeed, and yet that in abusive companies someone somehow can manage 30 people and succeed.
If you can't see how broken your argument is, then I don't know what to tell you. You're creating a false argument because you don't want to be wrong on the internet, a common problem for sure, and I get that, there's some weird primal thing that goes on in a lot of people's brains where they'd rather make themselves look stupid with a clearly nonsensical argument as you have here, rather than admit they didn't consider something before jumping to a conclusion. However, you should realise that here I wasn't even saying you were wrong - merely making the point that there are scenarios in which the GP might actually not be a negative actor in society for using that many temporary employees. That there are legitimate scenarios for the situation he describes as well as the negative scenarios you describe; there is scope for both of you to have valid points, and for neither of you to be wrong. Sometimes it's possible to add to someone else's point without being at odds with them, a novel concept I know.
If however you insist that no one could ever have a positive reason for having 30 temporary employees, then you're just going to continue making yourself look stupid, which is a shame, because it detracts from your point about abusive companies, which is also a good point, it's just not necessarily the only possibility.
No need to be defensive, I'm happy to admit when I'm wrong, I just know I'm not in this case because I've also worked with consultancies that operate in this way, and they're doing just fine, in fact, they're some of the biggest consultancies in the world with double digit or high single digit (8%/9%) profit growth every year since their creation. Whatever you may wish to believe, that's not "in for failure", that's a successful consultancy by any objective measure.
Probably, the biggest potentially false assumption you made here in your rush to disagree for the sake of disagreeing is that because he claimed he manages 30 people, that there's a flat hierarchy under him. Did you consider that maybe whilst he manages 30 people, that within those 3 people there may also be say, 3 team leads who are themselves temporary workers but who deal with technical leadership reducing the burden on him? It's perfectly possible to be responsible for 30 people but still have some of those 30 people share some responsibility for also managing the rest of them.
The main reason I don't buy refurbished is the price. I notice just before all major sales now Amazon in the UK tries to flog refurbished versions of their devices for like a 10% - 20% discount.
You wait for the actual sale, and you can get a brand new one for a 35% - 50% discount.
I'm happy to buy second hand stuff, if it comes at a second hand price - i.e. discounted to a greater degree than a new one ever is, but this seems to basically never be the case.
And this isn't out of snobbishness towards second hand goods, but to protect myself, as it's often the case that these overpriced second hand goods often come with reduced rights. So for example, in the UK you have upto 2 years warranty by law, and potentially up to 6 years to get a refund/replacement/repair on a faulty device, IF that device could reasonably be expected to have lasted that long. Therein lies the problem though, and where you lose protection under the law; a retailer like Amazon may accept that a high end product bought new should've lasted longer than it did under this law. However they would almost certainly be able to get away with not acting to fix/replace/refund on it if it was second hand, even if you paid the exact same price for it, because by nature of it being second hand they can reasonably argue that it shouldn't be expected to last as long.
So the reason I expect a second hand product to always be sold lower than the cheapest price of an identical brand new product isn't because I'm out for a bargain, but simply because the very nature of it being second hand comes with reduced consumer rights and protection, and therefore simply has an inherently lower value.
If retailers are going to continue to be greedy and can't accept that, then they're going to be stuck with second hand inventory exactly as they always complain about.
Some companies use contractors heavily because it allows them to grow and scale more rapidly than with a permanent employment base. This is fairly normal for consultancy firms that deal with a lot of high value, quick turn around contracts; for example they'll deal with say, 6 month contracts to build A in language and tech stack B. The first month might be requirements, design, and planning, followed by 4 months of dev, and 1 month of UAT and delivery. They only need to scale up in language B for 4 months, so they hire maybe 10 contractors for the period, and can therefore easily let them go when they're done. It's not unusual for someone working at such a company to have a few of these teams on the go at once, so having 30 TVCs doesn't mean that they're not temporary, it may simply mean that he just has 3 overlapping projects in their development phase, or perhaps even one big, albeit potentially still short-lived project.
Such consultancy firms may have permanent staff as well - these will typically be the reusable skills, project managers, architects, HR, payroll, and the like. They may have some permanent engineers for recurring and common languages like Java or the rare few that genuinely are great devs across multiple languages (many pretend to be but are usually shit at lots of languages or good at one, few are genuinely really good at many languages and stacks), but their bread and butter is mainly IT project planning, management, and design, so they sub-contract out the actual development.
So in my experience there are legitimate cases for having that many TVCs, and it's certainly not about abuse of employees or employment laws. IT contractors get paid a reasonable amount (at least here in the UK - the norm is now £400 - £500 a day even in the North of England, so $130k - $170k a year in US dollars), and they do still have permanent employees in their areas of specialisation - again, project management for example. As such in those cases it's win-win, the contractors get paid a very good salary, the company can fill short-lived contracts and grow and provide employment, and the customers can get rapid turnaround on important projects in short time frames.
Not all use of TVCs is about abusive zero hour contracts, sometimes it's an entirely mutual arrangement for everyone involved. Companies are willing to spend a lot of money to get stuff done quickly, so for companies and contractors willing to fulfill that need, it's extremely profitable.
"Health issues are a real problem to Agile development. You can't plan shit if you are only 75% sure people will actually work four days per two-week Agile cycle of their half time on the project. "Whatever you can do, John, whatever you can do" is not a ticket type."
This isn't the case, there are ways most agile development methodologies handle this, but in particular with SCRUM you assign a utilisation percentage to either individual resources or the team. We are a healthy (but I wouldn't say young) team and we only run at 60% utilisation because people fall ill, get distracted by random bullshit, have to fix their children, and god knows what else.
If you're doing SCRUM then you should have a backlog of tickets, and assigned to each ticket you should have a points value following the fibonacci sequence, one of the biggest mistakes people make in estimating with points is assuming they're a measure of time, they're not, they're a combination of risk and time. If something is short and zero risk it'll be a 1 point story, if something is short but high risk it might go up to 5 points, if something is long and high risk, it's probably not well enough understood to go into sprint, and so would have a points value sufficiently high for you to make it clear you can't complete it cleanly in a sprint - break it down and/or get more clarity before starting it. The points you assign are relative and personal to your team, there isn't a fixed definition, so what I've said may differ for your team, but essentially the point is this - you reach mutual agreement on how many points a story is by deciding between you in backlog refinement how many points should be assigned to that story. If you're just starting out with it then take a whole bunch of stories, write them on post it notes and juggle them around on a wall or table in order of size, then categorise them - 1 point, 2 points, 3 points, 5 points, 8 points, 13 points, 21 points, (TFB - too fucking big). Do this for a few sprints and you'll get comfortable in your team rapidly stating how many points you think should be assigned to a story. The whole point of points rather than hours, or something else is that they're not bound to a specific measure, and so can evolve with your team to become a measure for your team.
Once you're happy doing that, the next step is to start figuring out how many points you can do in a sprint - try maybe 30, if you easily hit that two sprints in a row then up it to 35 or 40, if you still find it easy keep increasing until you don't. If you have carry-overs, stories you didn't finish then consider dropping again your target points for the sprint.
This gives you the ability to cope with that degree of risk you're talking about - some sprints you may over-perform, but you don't have to increase the points at this time if on average you still only do less, sometimes you'll have a good sprint and do more, but track it on a graph and watch the trend. If it's an outlier ignore it, if there's a trend to doing more by pulling stories in because people have nothing to do then increase it, if there's a trend towards carryovers then decrease it.
That gives you the solution you need to the average amount of work you're able to do in a sprint and planning off the back of that - you plan for your average, you point out your backlog and say "We do 30 points a sprint average, so it'll take us 18 months to complete the backlog as is". Because you're not trying to measure time, and you're measuring based on the arbitrary metric of points, you'll be able to predict. Utilisation can be adjusted for holidays and other planned absences, so if you know half the team is on holiday and you normally run at 60% utilisation, then cut it to 30% and drop your points in half in sprint planning for that sprint.
I actually sympathise because the last thing people want to hear about agile is "you're doing it wrong" to the point it's become a cliche, and a meme, but a lot of people do do agile wrong because it's something they've had to implem
I met him two years ago, he's still moving around fine, and is as animated as ever when he's talking about the things he loves, but he said the biggest problem is that his memory is beginning to go a little bit, and this can sometimes mean he has to do more re-tries when he has to when recording as he's forgetting lines more than he used to.
I think this is why we're seeing more released from him now than we have for the last decade. He did Blue Planet 2 last year, Planet Earth 2 the year before, Dynasties starting this weekend, and now this newly announced show as well. He seems to be getting as much in whilst he still can and I think that highlights how much he generally loves doing this kind of work and releasing this kind of show.
Perhaps one of the most interesting things I found about him is how humble he is, I met him in the North of the UK, and there was no luxurious transport - he took public transport just like anyone else. I figure being lucky enough to get a train seat next to him could well be one of the most interesting 2 hour train journeys someone might have. In this respect you could also argue he really does practice what he preaches, as taking mass transport like a train is certainly much less polluting than getting someone to drive you which I'm sure he'd have no problem doing if he wanted to be driven around.
So fair play to the guy, even if you're not a fan of him he's at least hard working, motivated, and genuinely practices what he preaches when the option is available, and I don't think you can really fault that; at least he didn't take a helicopter, private jet, or have a private chauffeur drive him.
During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Challenger 2 tanks suffered no tank losses to Iraqi fire, although one was penetrated by an Improvised explosive device (IED). This was, at the time, unprotected by Dorchester armour. The driver was injured. In one encounter within an urban area, a Challenger 2 came under attack from irregular forces with machine guns and rocket propelled grenades. The driver's sight was damaged and while attempting to back away under the commander's directions, the other sights were damaged and the tank threw its tracks entering a ditch. It was hit by 14 rocket propelled grenades from close range and a MILAN anti-tank missile. The crew survived, safe within the tank until it was recovered for repairs, the worst damage being to the sighting system. It was back in operation six hours later. One Challenger 2 operating near Basra survived being hit by 70 RPGs in another incident."
Or maybe they were just using non-penetrating warheads being fired from ineffective angles, which might be an effective approach against a Humvee but is a bit like using a BB gun to try and destroy a land rover when used on a tank. I suspect this is more likely to be the case than secret magic armour, though the good version of Chobham armour the Challenger 2 uses is still a state secret even if it probably contains nothing magical I believe.
No, Saudi Arabia got a shock when oil dropped from $120 per barrel down to around $30 per barrel in 2014 as it plunged their economy into deficit. This gave them a massive wake up call and created a realisation that they can't depend on oil forever.
They were surprisingly smart, where most countries such as the UK and Russia have squandered their oil wealth with nothing to show for it, other countries like Norway set up a sovereign wealth fund to see them into the future. Saudi Arabia is taking this approach of forward thinking too, and planning for the future whilst it has oil wealth, rather than waiting until the oil wealth runs out then thinking "Right, now what?" when it's ultimately too late.
This decision to plan for the future has been cemented into reality in a number of very visible ways, from using it's massive investment fund to start focussing on future tech that will only grow in value going forward such as renewables and electric cars, by strengthening it's base economy through simple things such as liberalising it's approach to women. A key realisation was that the Saudi economy could literally double in size by allowing the half of it's population that are not currently allowed to work on equal terms to do so. It will be a long process as it requires changing attitudes when there are still very dangerous hard liners in the country but we've already seen some fairly big leaps towards it, such as allowing women to drive, and allowing women to make up over 30% of the ruling council, which interestingly is a better male-female ratio than most Western democracies. When only 50% of your working age population are allowed to work, enabling the other 50% to do so as a way to obtain a quick, easy, future proof, baseline economic boost is really a no brainer.
Furthermore, we've seen things such as purges of the corrupt elite to drive corruption out the economy, which can have severe consequences as we see in Russia - where Russia has masses of natural resource wealth, it gets filtered off into Swiss and Cayman bank accounts of only a handful of individuals to the detriment of the wider and long term health of the country. In fact, the only reason Russia with all it's potential isn't a wealthy modern economy across the vast majority of it's territory and has massive pockets of 3rd world levels of poverty is almost entirely because of corruption - even where economic mismanagement is a problem, such mismanagement usually occurs precisely to aid corruption.
So it's fairly clear that Saudi Arabia is one of a few countries that gets that oil isn't going to be around forever, and that is liberalising it's economy to cater to the realisation of that fact in many ways, from more forward thinking investments, to enfranchising women, to tackling corruption. It's likely Saudi Arabia will always be, or at least for the next few decades a fairly conservative country, but that doesn't appear to be a complete barrier now to modernising their nation as it has been for the last few decades, oil is no longer king, precisely because they saw how badly oil as a dependency can let them down in 2014.
Don't assume countries can't change and that because they were dependent on oil that they'll always be dependent on oil, Saudi Arabia is undergoing a very silent, but very rapid change to make sure that it's secure even if oil prices collapse. They've still got a lot of work to do, but the trajectory should be abundantly clear to anyone paying attention to the changes the country has undergone over the last few years.
Most seriously secure software goes through a number of procedures to ensure the highest level of security possible, static code analysis is an imperfect, but still helpful step in such a process. Doing this would likely kill any point in trying to decipher the output of an SCA tool.
As such, in software that's truly developed under a secure software development lifecycle including a multitude of approaches including things like an SCA would be near impossible with this approach.
Thus, even if in theory it might seem like a good idea, in practice it'd be impractical and would never fit into any sane secure software development lifecycle because it would inherently defeat a number of such processes in that lifecycle.
As such, this approach would have to be so good that it would have to be better than a series of tasks including things like peer reviews, static code analysis, pen testing and so on and so forth to justify using it over the aforementioned defence in depth approach of multiple layers of security assurance and risk mitigation during development.
In reality therefore, I'd agree with you absolutely and say whatever the theory on this, it's just not practical. Anyone wanting to maximise security would find this runs completely counter to any sane secure development lifecycle, and anyone not wanting that degree of layered security assurance, sure as hell wouldn't have the time and energy to introduce a ton of fake bugs and maintain such a codebase instead, because it'd simply be even more expensive than just having a sane defence in depth style secure development lifecycle as above.
I've tried game streaming from my Xbox downstairs to my PC and even that doesn't work well. If they can't get game streaming working well over a 10gbps LAN I've no fucking idea how they think they can make it work well over the internet and half way across the world.
No, the US airforce currently has a ~2,000 pilot shortfall, so drones can't be causing a decline in the number of pilots coming out of the airforce, because there aren't enough in it in the first place.
The reason for the shortfall is that many are suffering burnout from years of high operational tempo due to deployments to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, and because civilian airlines simply pay more.
As such, retention seems to be the biggest problem - being a fighter pilot looked like a sexy job on Top Gun, but when you realise it means 8 hour flights in a cramped cockpit by yourself with only a tube to pee in and only getting to fire one or two missiles a year at best on a training ground, it kind of gets a lot less sexy. With that taken into account, at that point, sitting in the nice relatively spacious cabin of a civilian airliner for 8 hours with one or two co-pilots to keep you company, getting paid way more, and with a proper toilet to use, and warm meals served to you on the job looks a lot more appealing.
Really though, it implies if the airforce is struggling too that there's just not enough pilots in general. I'm not sure if this is a US problem, or a global problem however, it's possible that non-US carriers are simply paying even more again and pulling US pilots overseas.
Given that you've resorted to deflection, rather than an honest recognition of the problem at this point I don't particularly expect this to sway you, but here you go, on the off chance, you might find it interesting:
Maybe there is some hope for your after all given you've apparently come to the realisation that you can't in fact deny reality any further, and now accept Musk's offers were all completely fucking useless given you have nothing else to say, so thanks for that.
Because Elon Musk is a credible source about Elon Musk?
Like a true attention seeking psycopath Musk is completely mis-representing things in that tweet, he's imply that because the Provincial Governor was not a subject matter expert, he also was not the rescue chief. This is nonense, the governor absolutely was leading the effort because you don't have to be an SME to do so, the SME's job is to coordinate offers for help and determine based on expert opinion what will and wont help, weigh up options based on advice from experts, and deal with the media.
Musk is also implying Rick was the only SME there, whilst Rick responded to Musk because Musk made promises about having a magical unicorn that could save the kids. When the unicorn and Musk turned up it turned out said unicorn was actually completely fucking useless because it was much bigger than promised, and sat unused in the way near the entrance of the cave. This is also why the guy in charge of the rescue made a point of saying as politely as possible that it was useless, because Musk had made a promise of one thing, then turned up with it only for it to be nothing like what they were promised just so he could get his face in the media as part of this rescue.
Perhaps the biggest irony of Musk's Twitter post, is that Rick, as one of the SMEs there was one of the most key voices in saying that it was useless for the rescue when it came to. It was too big, and would've blocked the smallest part of the cave, which would've just create an incredibly dangerous situation and would've almost certainly resulted in more drowned divers/kids.
So again, I repeat, why are you denying reality? Nothing Musk provided was used, the guy in charge of coordinating the rescue said so publicly because Musk had done nothing other than get in the way. If he's such a useful genius in every issue ever, and if he had so many options and solutions, then why were none of them used? You're still trying to deny reality.
I'll say again, I actually liked Musk because as arrogant as he can be, he did a good job with the hurricane relief efforts last year. This time around he couldn't help, but appears to be arguing against the people who actually did a really fucking good job because he can't accept that he can't win them all. Meanwhile, like a rebirth of Steve Jobs he seems to be creating a reality distortion field that reality denying fucknuts like you are clinging on to.
So I'll say it one last time, the subject matter experts, including the one cited by Musk, and his dive buddy on this mission - John Volanthen, opted to go for a diving only approach because Musk's sub wasn't any use in solving this problem. I'll also say again, that you cannot change reality no matter how much you try - nothing Musk provided was useful, hence why it wasn't used, even though it was there (and in the way).
If you can't get it into your head that nothing Musk provided was useful, hence why it wasn't used, then I'm not really sure what to tell you, you're stuck behind a reality distortion field as badly as any Apple zealot ever was, and need to get a fucking grip.
Yes, it would, because you're desperately flailing trying to recover a lost argument. Anything will sound like confirmation bias to you because you're incapable of accepting that you were wrong. Meanwhile the head of the Thai rescue has still said nothing he provided was any use - I'm sure they will allow anyone on site if they promise they can help, but when all they do is drop a fucking useless submarine in the way, and show the world how they're in the cave even though they're not fucking contributing then it's not surprising he was rebuked as being unable to contribute.
"None of those explanations were a blocker though"
Um, okay, if you think that, you still need to explain how you get the fucking thing there in a timely manner and prevent cave in, and no, using your magic words "experts!" doesn't do it, because if the experts could easily answer those questions they'd have fucking done it wouldn't they? but they couldn't, so they didn't. Again, why are you persisting in arguing against reality? If it was so easy and so foolproof why didn't they even remotely begin to achieve it?
"so why do you claim that some expert shouldn't be allowed at the table?"
Because the only place they're experts at cave rescue is in your head.
"You didn't realise that Elon had more potential solutions than just boring machines..."
Which were also fucking useless as it turns out.
"Dive rescue was always Option A, that was never in question. But congratulations for claiming the idea as your own. How proud you must be of yourself..."
No it wasn't, option A was to leave them in there until the water subsided. Option B was to find an alternative way in. However, it became clear from the weather forecasts that they had to resort to diving which was option C because they'd run out of time for the other options. If you actually read my post rather than going full retard in this thread you'd have seen I discouraged diving precisely because I understand the risks, but, given that it became the only remaining option because your Elon on a magical unicorn idea failed to materialise then it made sense to do this, rather than waiting for Elon's magic to never arrive resulting in 12 drowned kids.
"You've made it clear you don't get the concept of an options analysis. But if you need to keep going I have time."
What would be the point? You've already lost the argument because of the reality of how things actually went down, if you're going to continue engaging in reality denial, then I've got better things to do.
"You pointed out that dive experts are there which I agreed with. I merely argued that TFA is about the Thai gvot asking Musk for advice is prefectly legitimate request for other possible options of which Musk has access to other experts in different fields. The magic unicorn claim is in your head and says more about you than anyone else."
Yet you're still parroting mistruths, the Thai government still did not ask Musk, Musk got in touch with them.
He brought along his magic unicorn, a submarine that wouldn't fit through the caves, and they ignored it, because it was a useless and dangerous distraction.
So here we are, with the rescue going exactly as I suggested it would, and Musk's suggestions being treated exactly as I suspected they would, and drilling being a non-started, exactly as I said would likely be the case. Why are you carrying on? You made a suggestion, a reasonable one to ask - why can't they dig them out - and I explained why they couldn't, because you didn't realise boring machines were so big and heavy. It should really have ended there but instead you carried on, and have continued to make a fool of yourself, to the point we're now in a situation where the things I said have come to fruition and proven true.
What do you want to do? Keep arguing against proven reality now at this point? Sometimes it's best to just accept that you asked a legitimate question about why something isn't possible, get told why, and accept that, rather than try and pretend you know better when you're ridiculously out of your depth.
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That's not true, at least in the UK, some of the new challenger banks like Starling already offer everything Apple is offering here including no international fees, and the exchange rate they give is MasterCard's mid-market exchange rate, so is the actual real world market exchange rate, that means you don't pay anything to use your card abroad for either cash withdrawls or spending. The same applies if you buy anything online in a foreign currency, it's great; this is a debit card it's worth pointing out though, I don't know the details on their credit cards. You basically get a notification to your phone the second you make a foreign transaction that tells you how much it converted to in GBP.
I see this move by Apple as being similar to the iPhone launch in 2007. There are a number of industries where the US is just completely backwards, despite being technologically ahead of much of the rest of the world in most other areas. In 2007 that was mobile phones, currently banking is another example of an area where the US is at least 5 years behind the UK and Europe in terms of banking technology. Just as with the iPhone though, Apple leapfrogged Europe and ended up making the US a world leader in mobile phones, and so could well do the same here. What Apple is offering is effectively all the things UK banks have been offering for a few years now, but I don't mean that in a bad way; it means that Apple is bringing the US up to at least being on par with the UK in terms of credit card technology and offerings; in other words, Apple is bringing the US credit card market 5 years forward to the level many Europeans have come to accept as the norm. That gives Apple a massive advantage over other US banks and organisations that just don't seem interested in keeping up with the global leaders in consumer financial tech.
What I'm curious about is whether the itemisation of spending is closed or not in the US, it sounds like this is going to mirror a lot of the tech that has arisen around the Open Banking standards in the UK, where companies can produce categorization services that banks consume to categorise your expenditure for you and can do so due to the enforcement of open standards through Open Banking. I've just stopped working in the credit lending industry (mostly because I want my soul back), but I'm curious to see where Apple take this; the US consumer financial services market is desperate for modernisation to bring it up to par with Europe so there's massive scope here for Apple, but if they're not having to adhere to open standards like in the UK, then ultimately I believe they still won't be able to compete globally if they subsequently decide to do so due to the innovation that those Open Banking standards are bringing elsewhere.
Well, the fact I can get two hours of my day back by not commuting and instead work at home thanks to the internet is kind of a big deal.
I even get to spend my lunch time doing things I want to do, so there's yet another hour of my life back. Three hours of my life back per day I work at home, technology never made it easier to be a worker? Really? Are you fucking kidding?
Britain still isn't metric now in terms of distances. All our roads, vehicles, etc. still measure everything in miles.
Mostly the advantage used to be that having fixed hardware meant that developers could optimise specifically to the nuances of that hardware and get far more performance out of it than they ever could if they were just developing to the lowest common denominator they could reasonably support on the PC platform.
But it's also becoming less relevant nowadays, game development is getting ever more abstracted away from the hardware. It used to be that every game had it's own engine, or at least, there was a fairly substantial plurality of engines. This has become less true though, as the majority of games released nowadays are either built on Unity, or Unreal. The handful of studios that do still have their own engines are sufficiently large that they can support having them capable of performing on different hardware (and in fact, typically do anyway - Xbox, PS, Switch).
So I don't think it's really such an issue anymore, I don't think anyone is building games that are tightly coupled with the hardware on which they're running anymore. Optimisation is often done at engine level without the game running on the engine even having to care; things like shadows, particle systems, lighting and so on are degraded automatically by the engine, as are cross platform optimisations and nuances.
As such, it should be more possible than ever to get console games running on PCs providing the PC can provide the same services the console's OS can (achievements, party chat, cloud saves, etc.), which is really what this article is talking about.
I can't wait for the USS GoFundMe to enter the Strait of Hormuz to sort out Iran with it's complement of F-38 Kickstarter fighter jets piloted by guys in bright red Red Bull sponsored pilot suits all being livestreamed on Facebook playing to the tune of whatever the latest RIAA determined "hit of the moment" is.
Ah, apologies, thwarted by Slashdot's shitty threading system where the AC post in the middle was hidden :)
That's not how it works, it only takes one single bacterium from outside the lake, to make it into the lake, and start multiplying over a period of time that just happens to be capable of killing off the primitive life in the lake to prevent us ever really discovering what was down there.
This isn't a dilution thing where the danger is the risk of some small amount of chemical entering the lake that's diluted so much that it doesn't matter, life can replicate, grow, and spread, and if something gets in that ends up thriving in that environment because it's more evolved and can out compete the primitive species in the environment then it's potentially game over for knowing what was native to this primitive environment and what wasn't.
"Apparently you have reading comprehension challenges?"
That's a really original thing to say on Slashdot and surely automatically wins any argument. I've never heard it before. Did you think it up all by yourself?
"I tried using short sentences throughout with a single point per sentence for clarity to aid in your apparent reading comprehension challenges. Tip: resorting to insults doesn't help your argument nor mean you're "winning". It does indicate that you have no arguments to offer."
So by posting an insult and then stating that anyone resorting to insults has no argument to offer, you seem to be saying in a rather roundabout way that you have no argument to offer. It would seem rather important when you have the option of either insults or taking the moral high ground to pick one and stick with it, else you've a rather high chance of shooting yourself in the foot as you have here.
Like I said, honestly, your underlying point is a good one, there are a lot of abusive employers out there who abuse temporary contracts for sure. But it's still unfair to assume the worst case in someone or their employer based on a complete lack of evidence to back up your argument when there are legitimate uses of temporary workers that benefit everyone involved, even if you have had the misfortune to encounter or be burnt by such companies.
If you can't accept my point then I'm okay with that. For what it's worth, my sarcasm towards your comments above aside, I think your worldview paints you as a rather decent human being and I think it's a good thing to call out abusive working practices. I'm really only merely making the point that I'd just consider that there's also the possibility that the person you're responding to isn't engaging in that and might also be a good person providing employment to people who are happy to contract too.
That's an awful lot of words to simply say "I think I'll continue making myself look stupid, rather than accept that it's possible for more than one person to have a point in a discussion", you could've saved yourself an awful lot of time.
You're still making way too many assumptions to possibly be able to reach the conclusion you have. Your talk of contractor salaries and other issues are so entirely localised, and yet you have absolutely no clue where this person even works, much less what the local market is like.
You know what they say about assumptions? That's why you're continuing to make yourself look stupid, rather than making an argument based on the facts.
Your claimed experience and hence appeal to authority doesn't mask over the fact your argument is fundamentally broken by way of the fact that you're effectively arguing consultancies couldn't work like that (even though they do; it's your assumptions that are the problem) because no one could manage 30 people and succeed, and yet that in abusive companies someone somehow can manage 30 people and succeed.
If you can't see how broken your argument is, then I don't know what to tell you. You're creating a false argument because you don't want to be wrong on the internet, a common problem for sure, and I get that, there's some weird primal thing that goes on in a lot of people's brains where they'd rather make themselves look stupid with a clearly nonsensical argument as you have here, rather than admit they didn't consider something before jumping to a conclusion. However, you should realise that here I wasn't even saying you were wrong - merely making the point that there are scenarios in which the GP might actually not be a negative actor in society for using that many temporary employees. That there are legitimate scenarios for the situation he describes as well as the negative scenarios you describe; there is scope for both of you to have valid points, and for neither of you to be wrong. Sometimes it's possible to add to someone else's point without being at odds with them, a novel concept I know.
If however you insist that no one could ever have a positive reason for having 30 temporary employees, then you're just going to continue making yourself look stupid, which is a shame, because it detracts from your point about abusive companies, which is also a good point, it's just not necessarily the only possibility.
No need to be defensive, I'm happy to admit when I'm wrong, I just know I'm not in this case because I've also worked with consultancies that operate in this way, and they're doing just fine, in fact, they're some of the biggest consultancies in the world with double digit or high single digit (8%/9%) profit growth every year since their creation. Whatever you may wish to believe, that's not "in for failure", that's a successful consultancy by any objective measure.
Probably, the biggest potentially false assumption you made here in your rush to disagree for the sake of disagreeing is that because he claimed he manages 30 people, that there's a flat hierarchy under him. Did you consider that maybe whilst he manages 30 people, that within those 3 people there may also be say, 3 team leads who are themselves temporary workers but who deal with technical leadership reducing the burden on him? It's perfectly possible to be responsible for 30 people but still have some of those 30 people share some responsibility for also managing the rest of them.
The main reason I don't buy refurbished is the price. I notice just before all major sales now Amazon in the UK tries to flog refurbished versions of their devices for like a 10% - 20% discount.
You wait for the actual sale, and you can get a brand new one for a 35% - 50% discount.
I'm happy to buy second hand stuff, if it comes at a second hand price - i.e. discounted to a greater degree than a new one ever is, but this seems to basically never be the case.
And this isn't out of snobbishness towards second hand goods, but to protect myself, as it's often the case that these overpriced second hand goods often come with reduced rights. So for example, in the UK you have upto 2 years warranty by law, and potentially up to 6 years to get a refund/replacement/repair on a faulty device, IF that device could reasonably be expected to have lasted that long. Therein lies the problem though, and where you lose protection under the law; a retailer like Amazon may accept that a high end product bought new should've lasted longer than it did under this law. However they would almost certainly be able to get away with not acting to fix/replace/refund on it if it was second hand, even if you paid the exact same price for it, because by nature of it being second hand they can reasonably argue that it shouldn't be expected to last as long.
So the reason I expect a second hand product to always be sold lower than the cheapest price of an identical brand new product isn't because I'm out for a bargain, but simply because the very nature of it being second hand comes with reduced consumer rights and protection, and therefore simply has an inherently lower value.
If retailers are going to continue to be greedy and can't accept that, then they're going to be stuck with second hand inventory exactly as they always complain about.
Some companies use contractors heavily because it allows them to grow and scale more rapidly than with a permanent employment base. This is fairly normal for consultancy firms that deal with a lot of high value, quick turn around contracts; for example they'll deal with say, 6 month contracts to build A in language and tech stack B. The first month might be requirements, design, and planning, followed by 4 months of dev, and 1 month of UAT and delivery. They only need to scale up in language B for 4 months, so they hire maybe 10 contractors for the period, and can therefore easily let them go when they're done. It's not unusual for someone working at such a company to have a few of these teams on the go at once, so having 30 TVCs doesn't mean that they're not temporary, it may simply mean that he just has 3 overlapping projects in their development phase, or perhaps even one big, albeit potentially still short-lived project.
Such consultancy firms may have permanent staff as well - these will typically be the reusable skills, project managers, architects, HR, payroll, and the like. They may have some permanent engineers for recurring and common languages like Java or the rare few that genuinely are great devs across multiple languages (many pretend to be but are usually shit at lots of languages or good at one, few are genuinely really good at many languages and stacks), but their bread and butter is mainly IT project planning, management, and design, so they sub-contract out the actual development.
So in my experience there are legitimate cases for having that many TVCs, and it's certainly not about abuse of employees or employment laws. IT contractors get paid a reasonable amount (at least here in the UK - the norm is now £400 - £500 a day even in the North of England, so $130k - $170k a year in US dollars), and they do still have permanent employees in their areas of specialisation - again, project management for example. As such in those cases it's win-win, the contractors get paid a very good salary, the company can fill short-lived contracts and grow and provide employment, and the customers can get rapid turnaround on important projects in short time frames.
Not all use of TVCs is about abusive zero hour contracts, sometimes it's an entirely mutual arrangement for everyone involved. Companies are willing to spend a lot of money to get stuff done quickly, so for companies and contractors willing to fulfill that need, it's extremely profitable.
"Health issues are a real problem to Agile development. You can't plan shit if you are only 75% sure people will actually work four days per two-week Agile cycle of their half time on the project. "Whatever you can do, John, whatever you can do" is not a ticket type."
This isn't the case, there are ways most agile development methodologies handle this, but in particular with SCRUM you assign a utilisation percentage to either individual resources or the team. We are a healthy (but I wouldn't say young) team and we only run at 60% utilisation because people fall ill, get distracted by random bullshit, have to fix their children, and god knows what else.
If you're doing SCRUM then you should have a backlog of tickets, and assigned to each ticket you should have a points value following the fibonacci sequence, one of the biggest mistakes people make in estimating with points is assuming they're a measure of time, they're not, they're a combination of risk and time. If something is short and zero risk it'll be a 1 point story, if something is short but high risk it might go up to 5 points, if something is long and high risk, it's probably not well enough understood to go into sprint, and so would have a points value sufficiently high for you to make it clear you can't complete it cleanly in a sprint - break it down and/or get more clarity before starting it. The points you assign are relative and personal to your team, there isn't a fixed definition, so what I've said may differ for your team, but essentially the point is this - you reach mutual agreement on how many points a story is by deciding between you in backlog refinement how many points should be assigned to that story. If you're just starting out with it then take a whole bunch of stories, write them on post it notes and juggle them around on a wall or table in order of size, then categorise them - 1 point, 2 points, 3 points, 5 points, 8 points, 13 points, 21 points, (TFB - too fucking big). Do this for a few sprints and you'll get comfortable in your team rapidly stating how many points you think should be assigned to a story. The whole point of points rather than hours, or something else is that they're not bound to a specific measure, and so can evolve with your team to become a measure for your team.
Once you're happy doing that, the next step is to start figuring out how many points you can do in a sprint - try maybe 30, if you easily hit that two sprints in a row then up it to 35 or 40, if you still find it easy keep increasing until you don't. If you have carry-overs, stories you didn't finish then consider dropping again your target points for the sprint.
This gives you the ability to cope with that degree of risk you're talking about - some sprints you may over-perform, but you don't have to increase the points at this time if on average you still only do less, sometimes you'll have a good sprint and do more, but track it on a graph and watch the trend. If it's an outlier ignore it, if there's a trend to doing more by pulling stories in because people have nothing to do then increase it, if there's a trend towards carryovers then decrease it.
That gives you the solution you need to the average amount of work you're able to do in a sprint and planning off the back of that - you plan for your average, you point out your backlog and say "We do 30 points a sprint average, so it'll take us 18 months to complete the backlog as is". Because you're not trying to measure time, and you're measuring based on the arbitrary metric of points, you'll be able to predict. Utilisation can be adjusted for holidays and other planned absences, so if you know half the team is on holiday and you normally run at 60% utilisation, then cut it to 30% and drop your points in half in sprint planning for that sprint.
I actually sympathise because the last thing people want to hear about agile is "you're doing it wrong" to the point it's become a cliche, and a meme, but a lot of people do do agile wrong because it's something they've had to implem
I met him two years ago, he's still moving around fine, and is as animated as ever when he's talking about the things he loves, but he said the biggest problem is that his memory is beginning to go a little bit, and this can sometimes mean he has to do more re-tries when he has to when recording as he's forgetting lines more than he used to.
I think this is why we're seeing more released from him now than we have for the last decade. He did Blue Planet 2 last year, Planet Earth 2 the year before, Dynasties starting this weekend, and now this newly announced show as well. He seems to be getting as much in whilst he still can and I think that highlights how much he generally loves doing this kind of work and releasing this kind of show.
Perhaps one of the most interesting things I found about him is how humble he is, I met him in the North of the UK, and there was no luxurious transport - he took public transport just like anyone else. I figure being lucky enough to get a train seat next to him could well be one of the most interesting 2 hour train journeys someone might have. In this respect you could also argue he really does practice what he preaches, as taking mass transport like a train is certainly much less polluting than getting someone to drive you which I'm sure he'd have no problem doing if he wanted to be driven around.
So fair play to the guy, even if you're not a fan of him he's at least hard working, motivated, and genuinely practices what he preaches when the option is available, and I don't think you can really fault that; at least he didn't take a helicopter, private jet, or have a private chauffeur drive him.
Maybe that explains this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Challenger 2 tanks suffered no tank losses to Iraqi fire, although one was penetrated by an Improvised explosive device (IED). This was, at the time, unprotected by Dorchester armour. The driver was injured. In one encounter within an urban area, a Challenger 2 came under attack from irregular forces with machine guns and rocket propelled grenades. The driver's sight was damaged and while attempting to back away under the commander's directions, the other sights were damaged and the tank threw its tracks entering a ditch. It was hit by 14 rocket propelled grenades from close range and a MILAN anti-tank missile. The crew survived, safe within the tank until it was recovered for repairs, the worst damage being to the sighting system. It was back in operation six hours later. One Challenger 2 operating near Basra survived being hit by 70 RPGs in another incident."
Or maybe they were just using non-penetrating warheads being fired from ineffective angles, which might be an effective approach against a Humvee but is a bit like using a BB gun to try and destroy a land rover when used on a tank. I suspect this is more likely to be the case than secret magic armour, though the good version of Chobham armour the Challenger 2 uses is still a state secret even if it probably contains nothing magical I believe.
No, Saudi Arabia got a shock when oil dropped from $120 per barrel down to around $30 per barrel in 2014 as it plunged their economy into deficit. This gave them a massive wake up call and created a realisation that they can't depend on oil forever.
They were surprisingly smart, where most countries such as the UK and Russia have squandered their oil wealth with nothing to show for it, other countries like Norway set up a sovereign wealth fund to see them into the future. Saudi Arabia is taking this approach of forward thinking too, and planning for the future whilst it has oil wealth, rather than waiting until the oil wealth runs out then thinking "Right, now what?" when it's ultimately too late.
This decision to plan for the future has been cemented into reality in a number of very visible ways, from using it's massive investment fund to start focussing on future tech that will only grow in value going forward such as renewables and electric cars, by strengthening it's base economy through simple things such as liberalising it's approach to women. A key realisation was that the Saudi economy could literally double in size by allowing the half of it's population that are not currently allowed to work on equal terms to do so. It will be a long process as it requires changing attitudes when there are still very dangerous hard liners in the country but we've already seen some fairly big leaps towards it, such as allowing women to drive, and allowing women to make up over 30% of the ruling council, which interestingly is a better male-female ratio than most Western democracies. When only 50% of your working age population are allowed to work, enabling the other 50% to do so as a way to obtain a quick, easy, future proof, baseline economic boost is really a no brainer.
Furthermore, we've seen things such as purges of the corrupt elite to drive corruption out the economy, which can have severe consequences as we see in Russia - where Russia has masses of natural resource wealth, it gets filtered off into Swiss and Cayman bank accounts of only a handful of individuals to the detriment of the wider and long term health of the country. In fact, the only reason Russia with all it's potential isn't a wealthy modern economy across the vast majority of it's territory and has massive pockets of 3rd world levels of poverty is almost entirely because of corruption - even where economic mismanagement is a problem, such mismanagement usually occurs precisely to aid corruption.
So it's fairly clear that Saudi Arabia is one of a few countries that gets that oil isn't going to be around forever, and that is liberalising it's economy to cater to the realisation of that fact in many ways, from more forward thinking investments, to enfranchising women, to tackling corruption. It's likely Saudi Arabia will always be, or at least for the next few decades a fairly conservative country, but that doesn't appear to be a complete barrier now to modernising their nation as it has been for the last few decades, oil is no longer king, precisely because they saw how badly oil as a dependency can let them down in 2014.
Don't assume countries can't change and that because they were dependent on oil that they'll always be dependent on oil, Saudi Arabia is undergoing a very silent, but very rapid change to make sure that it's secure even if oil prices collapse. They've still got a lot of work to do, but the trajectory should be abundantly clear to anyone paying attention to the changes the country has undergone over the last few years.
Most seriously secure software goes through a number of procedures to ensure the highest level of security possible, static code analysis is an imperfect, but still helpful step in such a process. Doing this would likely kill any point in trying to decipher the output of an SCA tool.
As such, in software that's truly developed under a secure software development lifecycle including a multitude of approaches including things like an SCA would be near impossible with this approach.
Thus, even if in theory it might seem like a good idea, in practice it'd be impractical and would never fit into any sane secure software development lifecycle because it would inherently defeat a number of such processes in that lifecycle.
As such, this approach would have to be so good that it would have to be better than a series of tasks including things like peer reviews, static code analysis, pen testing and so on and so forth to justify using it over the aforementioned defence in depth approach of multiple layers of security assurance and risk mitigation during development.
In reality therefore, I'd agree with you absolutely and say whatever the theory on this, it's just not practical. Anyone wanting to maximise security would find this runs completely counter to any sane secure development lifecycle, and anyone not wanting that degree of layered security assurance, sure as hell wouldn't have the time and energy to introduce a ton of fake bugs and maintain such a codebase instead, because it'd simply be even more expensive than just having a sane defence in depth style secure development lifecycle as above.
I've tried game streaming from my Xbox downstairs to my PC and even that doesn't work well. If they can't get game streaming working well over a 10gbps LAN I've no fucking idea how they think they can make it work well over the internet and half way across the world.
No, the US airforce currently has a ~2,000 pilot shortfall, so drones can't be causing a decline in the number of pilots coming out of the airforce, because there aren't enough in it in the first place.
The reason for the shortfall is that many are suffering burnout from years of high operational tempo due to deployments to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, and because civilian airlines simply pay more.
As such, retention seems to be the biggest problem - being a fighter pilot looked like a sexy job on Top Gun, but when you realise it means 8 hour flights in a cramped cockpit by yourself with only a tube to pee in and only getting to fire one or two missiles a year at best on a training ground, it kind of gets a lot less sexy. With that taken into account, at that point, sitting in the nice relatively spacious cabin of a civilian airliner for 8 hours with one or two co-pilots to keep you company, getting paid way more, and with a proper toilet to use, and warm meals served to you on the job looks a lot more appealing.
https://www.military.com/daily...
https://www.airforcetimes.com/...
Really though, it implies if the airforce is struggling too that there's just not enough pilots in general. I'm not sure if this is a US problem, or a global problem however, it's possible that non-US carriers are simply paying even more again and pulling US pilots overseas.
Given that you've resorted to deflection, rather than an honest recognition of the problem at this point I don't particularly expect this to sway you, but here you go, on the off chance, you might find it interesting:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk...
Still think Musk is in it for anything other than his ego in this case? Really?
Oh I've long believed reality, there's no reality distortion fields here.
You really can't handle being wrong well can you?
Maybe there is some hope for your after all given you've apparently come to the realisation that you can't in fact deny reality any further, and now accept Musk's offers were all completely fucking useless given you have nothing else to say, so thanks for that.
Because Elon Musk is a credible source about Elon Musk?
Like a true attention seeking psycopath Musk is completely mis-representing things in that tweet, he's imply that because the Provincial Governor was not a subject matter expert, he also was not the rescue chief. This is nonense, the governor absolutely was leading the effort because you don't have to be an SME to do so, the SME's job is to coordinate offers for help and determine based on expert opinion what will and wont help, weigh up options based on advice from experts, and deal with the media.
Musk is also implying Rick was the only SME there, whilst Rick responded to Musk because Musk made promises about having a magical unicorn that could save the kids. When the unicorn and Musk turned up it turned out said unicorn was actually completely fucking useless because it was much bigger than promised, and sat unused in the way near the entrance of the cave. This is also why the guy in charge of the rescue made a point of saying as politely as possible that it was useless, because Musk had made a promise of one thing, then turned up with it only for it to be nothing like what they were promised just so he could get his face in the media as part of this rescue.
Perhaps the biggest irony of Musk's Twitter post, is that Rick, as one of the SMEs there was one of the most key voices in saying that it was useless for the rescue when it came to. It was too big, and would've blocked the smallest part of the cave, which would've just create an incredibly dangerous situation and would've almost certainly resulted in more drowned divers/kids.
So again, I repeat, why are you denying reality? Nothing Musk provided was used, the guy in charge of coordinating the rescue said so publicly because Musk had done nothing other than get in the way. If he's such a useful genius in every issue ever, and if he had so many options and solutions, then why were none of them used? You're still trying to deny reality.
I'll say again, I actually liked Musk because as arrogant as he can be, he did a good job with the hurricane relief efforts last year. This time around he couldn't help, but appears to be arguing against the people who actually did a really fucking good job because he can't accept that he can't win them all. Meanwhile, like a rebirth of Steve Jobs he seems to be creating a reality distortion field that reality denying fucknuts like you are clinging on to.
So I'll say it one last time, the subject matter experts, including the one cited by Musk, and his dive buddy on this mission - John Volanthen, opted to go for a diving only approach because Musk's sub wasn't any use in solving this problem. I'll also say again, that you cannot change reality no matter how much you try - nothing Musk provided was useful, hence why it wasn't used, even though it was there (and in the way).
If you can't get it into your head that nothing Musk provided was useful, hence why it wasn't used, then I'm not really sure what to tell you, you're stuck behind a reality distortion field as badly as any Apple zealot ever was, and need to get a fucking grip.
"Sounds like an invite was extended to me."
Yes, it would, because you're desperately flailing trying to recover a lost argument. Anything will sound like confirmation bias to you because you're incapable of accepting that you were wrong. Meanwhile the head of the Thai rescue has still said nothing he provided was any use - I'm sure they will allow anyone on site if they promise they can help, but when all they do is drop a fucking useless submarine in the way, and show the world how they're in the cave even though they're not fucking contributing then it's not surprising he was rebuked as being unable to contribute.
"None of those explanations were a blocker though"
Um, okay, if you think that, you still need to explain how you get the fucking thing there in a timely manner and prevent cave in, and no, using your magic words "experts!" doesn't do it, because if the experts could easily answer those questions they'd have fucking done it wouldn't they? but they couldn't, so they didn't. Again, why are you persisting in arguing against reality? If it was so easy and so foolproof why didn't they even remotely begin to achieve it?
"so why do you claim that some expert shouldn't be allowed at the table?"
Because the only place they're experts at cave rescue is in your head.
"You didn't realise that Elon had more potential solutions than just boring machines..."
Which were also fucking useless as it turns out.
"Dive rescue was always Option A, that was never in question. But congratulations for claiming the idea as your own. How proud you must be of yourself..."
No it wasn't, option A was to leave them in there until the water subsided. Option B was to find an alternative way in. However, it became clear from the weather forecasts that they had to resort to diving which was option C because they'd run out of time for the other options. If you actually read my post rather than going full retard in this thread you'd have seen I discouraged diving precisely because I understand the risks, but, given that it became the only remaining option because your Elon on a magical unicorn idea failed to materialise then it made sense to do this, rather than waiting for Elon's magic to never arrive resulting in 12 drowned kids.
"You've made it clear you don't get the concept of an options analysis. But if you need to keep going I have time."
What would be the point? You've already lost the argument because of the reality of how things actually went down, if you're going to continue engaging in reality denial, then I've got better things to do.
"You pointed out that dive experts are there which I agreed with. I merely argued that TFA is about the Thai gvot asking Musk for advice is prefectly legitimate request for other possible options of which Musk has access to other experts in different fields.
The magic unicorn claim is in your head and says more about you than anyone else."
Yet you're still parroting mistruths, the Thai government still did not ask Musk, Musk got in touch with them.
He brought along his magic unicorn, a submarine that wouldn't fit through the caves, and they ignored it, because it was a useless and dangerous distraction.
So here we are, with the rescue going exactly as I suggested it would, and Musk's suggestions being treated exactly as I suspected they would, and drilling being a non-started, exactly as I said would likely be the case. Why are you carrying on? You made a suggestion, a reasonable one to ask - why can't they dig them out - and I explained why they couldn't, because you didn't realise boring machines were so big and heavy. It should really have ended there but instead you carried on, and have continued to make a fool of yourself, to the point we're now in a situation where the things I said have come to fruition and proven true.
What do you want to do? Keep arguing against proven reality now at this point? Sometimes it's best to just accept that you asked a legitimate question about why something isn't possible, get told why, and accept that, rather than try and pretend you know better when you're ridiculously out of your depth.